NCERT denies with straight face, Advani says chief told me only 3 lines are ‘similar’

After a meeting with NCERT director J S Rajput whose authors are accused of plagiarising parts of a Class XII textbook on world history, Dep...

After a meeting with NCERT director J S Rajput whose authors are accused of plagiarising parts of a Class XII textbook on world history, Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani said today that ‘‘it can happen that thoughts are expressed in a similar fashion.’’

‘‘He (Rajput) brought both the books with him and told me that only three lines were similar, and that too the words used were different. Similarities can creep in, since historians keep reading the same things,’’ Advani said.

Facts are otherwise.

As first reported in The Indian Express, NCERT’s Contemporary World History has lifted several excerpts from World Civilization, Their History and Their Culture, a book written by four US historians. The portions lifted run into more than three lines—they cover Medieval Italian History, Martin Luther, Machiavelli and Estates General at Versailles.

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In fact, in just one excerpt on the Florentine family of Medici, 12 lines have been lifted.

Even the original author of the Italian history section, Robert E. Lerner, has identified them as his. ‘‘It certainly is plagiarism. And I don’t like it one bit. Four of the five passages you cited were written by me,’’ the Northwestern University professor told The Indian Express.

Earlier, Rajput went to meet Advani armed with the two books in question, and several other NCERT textbooks along with the Supreme Court judgment on the National Curriculum Policy.

After the 20-minute meeting, he claimed he had shown the excerpts to ‘‘independent’’ academicians and historians who said that a case of plagiarism could not be made out.

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He said that the NCERT had grown from publishing 2 crore books to 6 crore, ‘‘despite all propaganda’’ but nobody bothered to report on that.

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